First Person: Hal Niedzviecki on Peep Culture

Hal Niedzviecki, 40, is the author of eight books including The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbours. For the documentary Peep Culture, which premieres on CBC on Feb. 16, he installed eight cameras in his home and dives into the culture of self-exposure for entertainment. Here, Niedzviecki discusses reality TV, voyeurism and what it all means to him. As told to Melissa Leong.

“Peep Culture” is the phrase I coined to explain the culture of voyeurism and entertainment. We are learning to entertain ourselves by watching each other go about our everyday lives — our friends, our neighbours and random strangers around the world. We have this whole other kind of popular culture, which is everything from viral videos to blogs about your sex life to tweets about what you ate for dinner.

This documentary evolved out of the original book, which was The Peep Diaries. In the documentary, I take it to the next level, including installing eight cameras in my house and living with those cameras constantly on, broadcasting to the Internet while keeping up a steady barrage of tweeting, blogging and Facebooking.

I’d cook dinner with the cameras on and say: “How does this look? What do you think?” Then I’d play guitar and people would be making requests for Tom Waits songs. We started talking about my relationship with my brother and how my wife and I were thinking about having another a child. We had a camera in the basement bathroom. At times, I would find that 500 people were watching the toilet cam and 12 people watching me in the kitchen making dinner. Geez, they’d rather stare at an empty bathroom than watch me cook spaghetti.

The thing that shocked me was how easily I slipped into self-exposure and self-voyeurism for the sake of other people’s entertainment. I went from being apprehensive to being really into it. As soon as I did something remotely interesting, I ran to the Internet to see who had liked it, who was watching it and what they had to say.

I started doing things I wouldn’t necessarily do, such as make a big show of going to the bathroom and using my child as a prop in my own ongoing TV show. This pressure that I felt to be entertaining was very real and very visceral: people are watching me and wanting more.

Reality television is a big part of the Peep Culture phenomena. I tried to get into reality TV, was rebuffed and ended up heading to Los Angeles to attend a reality television boot camp, where me and 15 other students paid $1,000 to get instruction on how to try out and how to win. Winning is not coming in first; it’s getting the most attention and camera time. A lot of times you think the people who go on reality TV are on the verge of mental illness; but a lot of these people were normal. There was a dairy farmer. There was a retired police officer. There was a woman who was in clerical work. They wanted the fame.

The people that I met during the course of shooting the documentary who are heavily invested in Peep Culture, like a guy in California who broadcasts his life 24 hours a day, they were living their life unreflectively in the public eye. That was very hard for me to do. I’d put a video up and go, “Why did I say it like that?” A lot of those people don’t have family, they’re not married, they don’t necessarily have kids. You can see how easy it is for them to slip into this world where you have instant community, instant attention, what seems to be constant enthusiasm for everything you do in your life.

As it went on and more and more tensions arose whether it was with my family or the people who were watching. I became almost angry and recalcitrant about the whole thing.

The thing that I learned about the phenomena of Peep Culture is just how dangerously easily it is to accept it. If we use these things to communicate with each other and form meaningful communities then I think it does have a lot of value.

But because it all becomes about branding and monetizing your personal life and this obsession with numbers — how many followers we have, how many people read a blog post — it is a negative. It takes value away from the moment. From saying, “I’m just here with my friend and family; I just did a hike and I’m overlooking this beautiful vista.” That should be the moment. That’s enough. But it’s not enough any more. Now the moment is taking a video of the vista and uploading it as soon as possible so your followers can comment.